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Jobseekers use ‘twesumes’ to highlight experiences

By Lauren Viola, Gavel Media Team, on February 25, 2010 10:15 PM

By Lauren Viola, Asst. Features Editor – (Photo courtesy of hrch.files.wordpress.com)

Santa,

ZUP

BC UR J2G hrs 2 tkts 2 Aruba 4U n ms Claus 4t mth of dec

O n mayB Rudy n d boyz cn join U

TTYL d Grinch

A quick translation:

Santa,

What’s up? Because you are just too good, here’s two tickets to Aruba for you and Mrs. Claus for the month of December. Oh, and maybe Rudy and the boys can join you?

Talk to you later,

The Grinch

Though this may not be the typical Christmas letter you wrote as a kid to Santa Claus, language like this is rapidly becoming the norm for all sorts of communication. Originally, it began as a short hand way to type to a friend on AOL messenger or send a quick text message without going over a 160-character limit. However, shorthand, abbreviations and minimized words have taken over the globe. Their latest captive: resumes.

New social networking sites seem to spring up daily, as their popularity seemingly increases by the minute. Whether used for reconnecting with old friends or colleagues, keeping in touch with people who are far away, sending fun messages to your friends down the hall or posting pictures to share with friends and family, there is no doubt that the online social network phenomena is quickly expanding to cover it all.

However, with information on the internet being globally public even with the use of certain privacy settings, there has always been a concern as to what is posted on these Web sites and who can potentially see them. For a college student, this concern usually winds down to two very important people: mom, and the person from whom your future paycheck will come.

But if we look past these concerns, and the precautions that need to be taken to make sure a potential boss does not see what you did last Friday night, we find that social networking sites can actually be helpful in finding a new career or in starting one.

A recent article in Newsday, entitled “Why U shld hire me!” says, “Job hunters who’ve whittled their resumes down to one page have a brand new challenge — getting them down to 140-character Tweets; make that 120 if you leave room for retweeting.”

Impossible? Kristin Borrero, CSOM ’11, thinks it might be. “Even trying to keep my resume to a page for me is extremely difficult, but to try to make it 140 characters I would find virtually impossible,” she said.

With such intense competition these days for every position on the market, resumes are an extremely important tool for students and older job hunters alike. A job seeker is trying to get their personality and qualifications across to a potential employer, especially since resumes are normally looked at before an interview process even beings.

“I usually try to get across something completely distinct and unique in that individual point while keeping it extremely strong and action based,” Borrero says what she tends to highlight on her resume. “I also try to incorporate some sort of numbers into it or some sort of quantitative measure of how I per¬formed in that job or activity so that the perspective employer can get a good picture of the actual benefit of the task that I was working on … a lot of employers only spend the first 30 seconds looking at your resume.”

This highlights how long we have to get our uniqueness, qualifications and important background informa¬tion across before our resume gets tossed to the side.

What the new wave of online resumes, or “twesumes” seems to be doing is forcing us to beat the employers to the punch, and only give them 30 seconds of information to read.

“Those who see Twitter as a job-search tool need a succinct but compelling ‘twesume,” Allison Hemming, founder and president of Manhattan talent agency Hired Guns, said in Newday. “It calls for focus and editing, and, if your story is neither short nor compelling, people won’t share it with others. And that’s networking death.”

So what can you actually say about yourself in less than 140 characters (about the length of this sentence) that would give any sort of true picture of who you are?

“I think I would try to highlight my passions as well as how I’d like to put those into work at a specific job or position,” Borrero says. “I don’t think that in 140 characters you can talk about your educational background, your extracurricular background, interests, your technical skills and your past work experience, you couldn’t even list those things in 140 characters.”

“Twesumes” seem to be about focus and branding yourself. “Whether it’s in written form or in an elevator pitch you need to have a brand and have that be a unique something,” Borrero says. “Something that’s unique and different about you, that sets yourself apart from somebody else that could easily say the very same things about themselves or has a lot of the same experiences.”

Though they may be a challenge for many to write, “twesumes” can be used for other purposes, such as a tagline on the back of your business card, or a starter for your cover letter or resume.

But with a “twesumes” present or not, and no matter whose tweets you are following, technology seems to have spread its grasp even deeper into the realm of job hiring and recruitment.